Introduction
With modest beginnings commencing in 1972, loudspeaker manufacturer PSB has become one of the most recognizable icons in today's audio industry. Receiving endless accolades from industry peers, as well as delighted consumers, the Canadian-based company is well known for providing products with exceptional performance, which are value-engineered to compete with products often costing substantially more.
Now that PSB is part of The Lenbrook Group, original owner Paul Barton operates as chief designer and continues to be one of the most impassioned patriarchs in the audio industry today. Barton has been highly influential in developing many of the design protocols and scientific guidelines used in many of today's high-performance loudspeakers. Throughout his career, he has extensively utilized Canada's National Research Council (NRC), a government-managed scientific and engineering research institution, taking full advantage of their expansive resources and state-of-the-art testing facilities.
PSB's ...

Introduction
Sometimes in life, less is more. It seems the older I get, the more often I find myself muttering this popular cliché. All too often, the electronics industry does not share my affection for this philosophy, thus leaving me pulling my hair out over AV system complexities that I never dreamed possible or realized were in any way necessary. If you pay any attention to consumer electronics, as does any reader of AVRev.com, you know that there is a never-ending stream of new products always trumping the previous version with new features and complexities. Just when you think all sanity has been lost, along comes a company like ZVOX Audio. They are the proverbial breath of fresh air that this industry sometimes lacks.
The company was created by people from some of the best-known brands in the audio arena, such ...

Introduction
Last summer, my wife and I decided to put our condominium on the market and buy a house. As part of the process, we had our realtor walk through the condo and make recommendations for “staging” it to make it more attractive to more buyers. The first thing she asked me to do was to get rid of my large floor-standing towers in the living room and replace them with something smaller. I was mortified, as I really enjoyed having full-sized speakers in my living/theater room. I spoke with Mike Manousselis of Dynaudio shortly thereafter and explained my situation. Mike assured me that he had a system from the Contour series that would fulfill my needs. It was like a scene out of one of those fix ‘em up shows on the DIY Network, but I needed a bigger house ...

Introduction
It should come to no surprise that flat panel televisions are all the rage these days, and rightly so. They look great, can be hung on the wall for mega-wow factor and are the reason for marital bliss in countless homes nationwide. The fact that flat screens are as much a fashion item as they are a source of entertainment has done wonders to ease the age-old conflict between a man’s desire for a huge video screen for watching football and a woman’s desire to have an orderly living room. It is my belief that this conflict was a primary motivation for manufacturers to create televisions thin enough to hang on the wall in the first place. I can hear the meetings now: “Make it look nice, so wives will like it and will let their husbands go crazy and ...

Introduction
The concept of power, or “active” loudspeakers, is one the audiophile community has fought since the beginning of time. Audiophiles have been wrong in their initial fears about all new audio formats (think LP, CD, DVD-Audio and even the almighty iPod), anything to do with EQ and, most importantly, room acoustics – they are wrong about active speakers, too. The idea of a company building amplifiers into speaker cabinets that are specifically designed to power the drivers and electronic (active) crossovers that make up a speaker system are in many cases better left to people who have real measurement tools and fixed environments to design from, rather than audiophiles who have a Platinum card and are looking to tweak. And tweaking is exactly what many of us have heard from the audiophile publications as they spew their misguided sermons of ...